Wrong Evenings (2011)

Waterloo Sampler No. 1 (2005)

Simon Jenner
About Bloody Time (2007)

ISBN 9-02731-32-8

Voted one of the Guardian reader's

'With almost breath-taking twists of language... Reading this work has made me re-consider 'the real of beauty' in Keats' phrase.'David Pollard

There is genius in this poetryMartin Seymour-Smith

'Schoenberg's System' is a concise, imaginative and completely true poem... In a thoroughly admirable way, this work is miles from the prevailing styles admired in this country at the moment... It's hard to guess which poets have been an influence... There's some very good poetry herePeter Porter

Simon Jenner is a serious and witty writer. His work is difficult but rewards close attention... There may well be a considerable new poet on the horizon. In my opinion, his best work is yet to come.Robert Nye

Simon Jenner's originality, long hived away, has finally reached book form. His high-impact yet elegiac language, metaphysical wit, and refusal to come off the tightrope between modernism and recognizable states like emotion, have made him, like some few of his contemporaries, very hard to categorize. His eschewing the suppression of conflicting states in his poetry has disturbing resonances, and unexpected comic epiphanies - like the funereal focus on his father's tin leg. Comedy becomes elegiac, tragedy a sad farce. But the sheer difference of his poetry is unforgettable.

Simon Jenner was born in Cuckfield in 1959. Failing everything at school except art, he learnt to fly instead, where discovering poetry forestalled a career in airframes. To forestall the dole, he was belatedly educated at Leeds, then Cambridge where the quaint paradox of writing his PhD Dreaming Fires: Oxford Poetry of the 1940s was hardly lost on anyone who tried to read him.

Despite early recognition from poets and critics like Martin Seymour- Smith, Jenner's extraordinary debut has been a curiously protracted one. It came via obstinate recognition - and poetry tours - in Germany in 1996 and 1997, a South East Arts Bursary (1999) and Royal Literary Fund grants in 2003 and 2006.

In 2001 he was commissioned to write a major poem by the BBC, and appeared on BBC Radio 1999-2003. He has been Director of Survivors' Poetry, from 2003.